December 2015

Viewing posts from December , 2015

Co-written by Jim Naro, CustomerCentric Selling® Certified Business Partner/President of The Naro Group and Ron Snyder, President of Plan 2 Win Software

According to Gartner Group, “65% of a company’s business comes from existing customers and it costs 5 times as much to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one satisfied.” This indicates the importance of not only doing a good job of managing opportunities during customer acquisition, but also following up with purposeful customer engagement to grow relationships and drive revenue growth on an ongoing basis.

The gap between opportunity management and account planning is not new and it’s typically driven by several misconceptions, such as:

Building your relationships and sphere of influence is part of account planning only; it’s not part of opportunity management

It’s ok to implement these processes in silos within the organization

Create a Virtuous Cycle to Close the Gap

1. Win the deal with skillful opportunity management

2. Identify future opportunities with effective account planning

3. Repeat

Too often, salespeople are focused on just winning the deal. They adopt a “won and done” attitude. But if they see the deal all the way through its implementation, all the key players will be more pleased with the results. Then they can use their success story to help win the next opportunity and maintain a lasting business relationship.

Those who go beyond opportunity management into account planning are more successful because they are building a more strategic and holistic presence in their accounts, enlisting support from all the key players.

Build on Successful Opportunity Management with a Winning Account Plan

Key elements from your team’s opportunity management process will “seed” their account planning process. Further, it is important to develop a strategy with the key players in the account that they are committed to; rather than a plan that is just internal to your organization.

1. Understand the customer’s business drivers

Business drivers are important operational, financial, organizational, and/or technological characteristics and trends. They might be related to revenue and profit growth, cash flow improvements, cost decreases, keeping up with industry shifts, or adding new products/markets. Salespeople need to talk to buyers about what they need to move beyond the status quo to achieve breakthrough outcomes, and discuss how to help facilitate that change.

2. Generate a competitive strategy

As a vendor, your challenge is to prove that your team is the customer’s best resource; you will provide better solutions and more value than any other colleague or vendor. Your team’s strategy for helping accounts get results for their business objectives must be compelling enough to overcome an even bigger competitor – No Decision, Inc.

3. Develop a sphere of influence with key players

It used to be that you needed to convince only one buyer with a budget that you were their vendor of choice. Now the average size of a B2B buying team size is 7 people, according to IDG. While your sales rep may have a good account advocate , he or she must still build relationships with the entire decision-making team to learn what their spending priorities are and ensure your offerings are approved and funded.

The buyers aren’t the only people salespeople need to rely upon for a successful implementation. They also need to develop relationships with those who execute the project and those who understand all the change management issues the account may face.

4. Establish metrics for success and follow up regularly

The most empowering question to ask a buyer is, “How would you measure success for your investment or project?” By following up with an account on how their results measured up, salespeople can ensure the implementation is on track and offer additional services as needed. They can learn about other ways your offering impacts the account and be better equipped to leverage the success in one unit to build referral relationships within other areas of the account.

Defining account success gives your team the opportunity to celebrate their champions and to provide more value to the account.

Strengthen Core Tactics to Increase Probability of SuccessThese strategies are equally valuable in both opportunity management and account planning:

Respond to key trends and industry changes with a SWOT analysis

Leverage contacts and share information across your whole team, including accounts and partners

Utilize limited resources effectively

Create and implement action plans that can be easily monitored and regularly updated

Conduct Win/Loss reviews as a team to share best practices and learn from each other’s challenges.

The Bottom LineAccording to CSO Insights, 25% of sales organizations have a win rate of less than 25% and quota attainment of 40%. However, the top sales organizations have a win rate of greater than 65% and 65+% quota achievement. Using effective opportunity management and account planning can help your organization be top performers.

In my experience when implementing CRM software, many companies define a single set of milestones to reflect the steps that need to be taken for large transactions. In the same way you don’t want to kill a mosquito with a cannon, this can make adherence to the process unwieldy or even impossible for smaller transactions where there should be fewer process steps. Sellers often have transactional business where applying the single set of milestones would be far too time consuming.

The good news is the heavy lifting has been done after defining the steps to be done in major opportunities. The most complex would probably be closing prospects that have not done business with a vendor before in that they have to become familiar with the company, may need a written cost vs. benefit, will have to execute new legal documents, etc. In stark contrast, many of these steps should be skipped with customers placing orders for offerings they already have installed.

Other types of transactions that require custom milestones might be:

Global accounts

Large accounts

SMB clients

Add-on business

Professional services

Renewals

Another approach is for companies to require milestones based upon transaction sizes rather than leave it up to salespeople to make that determination.

It is important that the steps required be proportional to the size of opportunities. If the number of milestones is overkill, companies run the risk of having salespeople (rightfully) not follow the process. This is a slippery slope and can adversely affect adoption of the software that has been implemented.

Companies selling complex offerings are challenged to help sellers relate to executive buyers. If they are unsuccessful, decisions are often made by lower levels. I’d like to offer an analogy for your consideration.

Let’s assume in preparing for a Grand Prix racing season a driver with minimal experience is hired and the most critical decision looms: Choosing a car. In light of his limited experience, the driver defers to the pit crew to make the decision. They are virtually certain to have biases. Understanding they are primarily measured on “up time” of cars, including the time needed for pit stops and repairs, it’s likely they’ll choose a car that is reliable, easy to work on and one they have prior experience with. Cars failing to meet these criteria will not make the “short list.”

In allowing the decision to be made in this way, the pit crew has failed to consider the driver’s main criteria: Acceleration, braking distances, top speed and handling. Allowing the pit crew to choose the car will likely mean being able to finish a higher percentage of races, but would compromise the ultimate probability of winning races.

On the other hand, if a driver chooses a car solely on performance without regard for reliability, he would be more likely to lead during early laps but finish fewer races because the car was pushing the limits and prone to breaking down. As with most things in life, there should be a compromise between the driver and pit crew requirements to arrive at an optimal decision.

In my mind, this analogy describes the roles of executives (drivers) and pit crews (IT) in making enterprise technology decisions. When sellers don’t relate to executives to allow them to have input into the business drivers and have a conceptual idea of how they can be achieved, decisions are often delegated to IT. Their biases will include how easily the new offering can be integrated into their existing architecture, how familiar the staff is with a given offering, how difficult the implementation will be, etc.

IT will always do the “heavy lifting” in evaluating offerings. The challenge is for vendors to empower sellers to bring executive business issues and results into play so that better buying decisions can be made.